A Million Open Doors

by John Barnes

  She glared at me, clearly too furious to speak, or eat, or do anything except glare. Perhaps I had turned the compliment badly? No, as I turned it over in my mind, it had been fine, a true gem of the flatterer's art. Did she feel it was insincere? It had not been, and surely she would realize that?

  She kept glaring.

  Finally I said, "I'm sorry. Of late, I have been in the grip of finamor, but now that I have recovered from my melancholy over Garsenda, I obviously need to make some amends."

  From the way she bolted the next piece of food, I could tell I had not yet said the right thing. "Giraut," she said, "that is so stupid I'm not sure it is worth talking to you about. Have you ever wondered what the jovents look like to us donzelhas? I'm just asking out of curiosity."

  "Well—uh. I've read a lot of poetry by women, about men."

  "Written for men."

  "Ja, verai." When all else fails, admit you're an idiot. "You're right, I don't understand what you're talking about."

  "No, you don't," she said, taking another big bite of potatoes without scraping any of that nasty brown glop off. "Why is it all right for you to act like a complete fool for weeks, with everyone required to sigh and admire you, even though we all knew Garsenda was flighty and just plain stupid besides—and then when she turns out to be doing just exactly what any ardently fashionable young woman in Noupeitau does these days—what you yourself might have expected if you'd had half a brain—we're all supposed to be in mourning because you've been tragically wronged?"

  It all seemed obvious to me. "It's just fun, Bieris. Being a jovent is something you do for fun for a few years. That's all. Besides, I thought we were talking about you being a farmhand. I was trying to be nice about that." I glanced at Aimeric for support, but he was still engrossed in his conversation with Bruce.

  She sighed and brushed her hair back off her face. "Have you ever noticed that practically everything the jovents do is pointless without an audience of women?"

  Before I spoke again I had gobbled about half of that grim piece of greased meat. I made myself slow down and take a long drink of water, then said, "Uh, no, but it's true."

  "It's true for everyone in Nou Occitan," she said, "think about your parents, or mine."

  "There are a lot of women in important positions." It was pretty feeble and she just made a face at me. I tried to continue, stammering awkwardly—"I guess ... well, certainly, verai, I know what you're going to say. Nobody on Wilson pays any attention to what the government or the corporations do anyway as long as their allowances keep coming in, so if you look at the Palace or the arts, where all the energy and intelligence goes—that's almost all male."

  Bieris nodded, the first sign of approval I had seen from her. "Except for dance. Men like looking at us when we're nearly naked. And I would bet you've never noticed any of this, Giraut, before I pointed it out to you."

  "No, I haven't. I'm sorry."

  I ate a little more, but my appetite was gone. She brushed her hair back again. I had never noticed before that she seemed to be annoyed by having it fall across her face all the time.

  After a while, Bieris said, "Giraut, I'm sorry."

  "It's fine. You're right."

  "Ja, I am, but you weren't the person I was angry with. I'm not sure who is. It's only—well, when I got here the first thing Bruce did was ask me to do physical work, and it was no special thing at all—he didn't ask me in any way differently from how he'd ask you or Aimeric." She sighed and looked around the room. "This isn't easy for me to explain, Giraut."

  "You're doing fine. I think. At least it's making sense even if I don't understand it"

  "This is the first time I've ever felt like a person, I suppose. Instead of like a donzelha. Have you ever seen any of my paintings, Giraut?"

  Bieris had been at every public performance I had ever given. At that moment I died a couple of thousand deaths. "No. And I'd like to."

  She opened up the small locket she wore around her neck, took out her portfolio, and handed it to me. I took out my pocket reader, slid her portfolio into the slot on the back, and raised it to my eyes.

  "Look at the last ten especially," she said. "Remember the aurocs-de-mer?"

  "They're hard to forget."

  "That's the last ten."

  I pressed the codes to see the last ten paintings; Aimeric and Bruce were gabbling on about somebody's dead third cousin.

  "If you hate them and think they're really terrible—lie," Bieris said. I glanced up from the eyepiece and she had that bent grin I remembered from childhood and schooldays. When had I seen her smiling like that last? Maybe graduation day when the faculty toilets had suddenly erupted just when they were all in there putting on their formal robes. And where had that side of Bieris gone when she got involved in finamor with Aimeric?

  Thinking of that—in my career of six entendedoras, what had any of them actually thought about me? What were their memories like?

  I doubt Bieris knew my thoughts, but she could see I was thinking, so she waited a long breath before pointing to the reader I still held.

  I put the reader to my face. My breath slowly sighed out. The painting was extraordinarily well done; I realized with a guilty start that if Bieris had been male, she'd have been ranked with the very best of the jovent painters. And its quality was not merely in clarity of composition or simple technique, though both were superb, but in the sharp intelligence of its seeing. I could almost feel my own memory of the day slide away as this took its place. It was Bieris who had truly seen the huge herd that poured over the riverbank, the soft reds, browns, and yellows of the plains.

  I flipped to the next painting and looked out across the plains to the first rising smoke of the oncoming fire; to the next and saw a terrified auroc-de-mer struggling in the mud; and on through them. It would take many repeat visits for me to really say I understood the work.

  As always when praising art, I began to speak in Occitan, and then stopped, strangling conventional forms in my throat—there didn't seem to be any words for the way these paintings made me feel. There was something missing in the Occitan perception—

  I raised the reader to my eyes again, and flipped back to the first one, and there in the background was the shining specular blur of red sunlight bouncing off the pipelines feeding the polar glaciers. In the next, the auroc-de-mer died framed by the scaffolding that carried the muck pipeline into the areas being planted in forests.

  Her wide landscape of the great intrusion of plains into the gorge revealed, on the horizon, a blue-white plume dancing in the red sky—hydrogen from the ocean, brought five hundred km by pipeline and burned to get water into the air in the huge dry basin around the South Pole. The rocks themselves in the gorge showed the not-yet-weathered melting and glass fragments from the many directed meteor impacts that had been needed to give the basin an outlet to the sea.

  In other paintings the power lines for the heaters that kept permafrost from forming, the concrete baffles that slowed and bent the Great Polar River so that it flowed like a much older stream, and even the high dams on the mountain gorges were clearly visible. You could look through four centuries of Occitan landscapes and never see one of those things. Every painting of the South Pole I had ever seen had shown trees bending over the river, little lakes and pools lying everywhere, and forests on the distant mountains—the way it would look in four hundred years when it was done, not the way it was today.

  When I looked up at her, it was with the painful realization that she was more artist than I would ever be, and that if I would have anything to brag about from my jovent days, it would be my friendship with her.

  "We talked about it," she said. "On Wilson, people want paintings of what everything will be like when the terra-forming is complete."

  "But Bieris—here on Caledony, there's no art at all, and ... these are spectacular! Back home such an exhibit that could make your career!" A thought struck me. "Have you shown Aimeric?"

  She made a f
ace. "You must be joking."

  I dropped the subject. "So—if you're painting like this, why are you hanging around here as a farmhand?"

  She grimaced at me. "Then you haven't really seen Sodom Basin, either."

  At least I knew the right thing to say. "No, I haven't. Tell me. Or if you can't tell me, I'll just wait for the paintings."

  "You might have to wait for the paintings to fully explain it," she warned. "But it's the light, and the reflections off the snow on the Pessimals, and how green everything is—"

  "But what is it you can see as a farmhand that you can't see by just being there in your off hours? Or do you just want to avoid the trip every day?"

  All of a sudden, finally, she was really smiling at me—in a way I couldn't remember since puberty had hit us both. I liked that more than I could have said. "You do understand," she said.

  "A little, maybe. Explain it slowly, in little words, companhona." It was a silly word to use, one that just slipped out—the feminine of our word for a close friend, but in Occitan a grown man never applied it to a donzelha, let alone to a grown woman.

  She apparently failed to notice. "When I work in a landscape, I have to see it in more detail. To know a storm cloud I have to know what all clouds look like, to tend an orchard I have to be able to see the individual apples on the individual tree. That's all. I'm sorry. I probably could have explained all that to you in three sentences. It's just that nobody's listened to me in ages. You know the old saying—'If you're tired of listening to her, make her your entendedora."

  "Are you people done with the fine local cuisine?" Aimeric asked, breaking in. We both jumped at the sudden noise.

  FOUR

  Two days later, I pulled the cat I was now leasing into the parking area of the new building for the Center for Occitan Arts, which had finished growing less than three hours before. The last freighter was pulling back out through the loading doors, and huge loads of stuff needed to stock and ready the Center for classes were piled in what would be the assembly hall. To get the unpacking and setting-up done, I had arranged for some robots, and they arrived as I was closing the loading doors.

  This was my third time unpacking and rearranging furniture in three days. The day before, my things had finally arrived, apparently after some trouble with getting them packed and moved on Wilson. I had seen at once that my baroque furniture didn't go well with the smooth, clean lines of Brace's guest house, and had hinted to Bruce that I would be very interested in seeing any interior designs he might have for the place. That seemed to delight him—as much as you could tell with a Caledon—and for no reason I could see, it pleased Bieris too, who promptly requested the same for her place. Really, I just didn't want the contrast between my beautiful furniture and that bland, lifeless house to make me homesick.

  Bruce had had quite a few designs on file, so we had them made up the following First Afternoon, put our Occitan things in storage, and did our second job of furniture moving.

  Now I was about to start my third, and in a much bigger building.

  In this mild yellow fog, a few degrees above freezing, with the rime on its soaring buttresses turning to shining icewater, the Center stood out against the gray concrete boxes around it like a piece of magic thrown into a geometry lesson. The first two hours setting up the place were wonderful fun; I created a snug apartment for myself out of one of the sleeping rooms so that I could stay the night when necessary, got the robots to lay and cover the mats for the dueling arts room, and had the Main Lounge turned into a pretty fair copy of Pertz's—though I purposely omitted the Wall of Honor. I had a feeling that concept might be more than Caledons would tolerate at first.

  That accounted for the first cargo, and there was still more than an hour of First Light left, so I ordered the furniture for the seminar room and the little theater—since the fabrication plant was only fifteen minutes away by trakcar, and it took less than forty minutes to grow an order of furniture, I had to be careful to order things in the order in which I wanted to bring them in.

  I sat down and had a sandwich and a plum while the robots removed construction dust from the upper floors—gratz'deu I had a springer vacuum in my baggage, probably the only one in Caledon at the moment, and the recycling plant had already built its springer, so the dust sailed cleanly out of my place and became their problem.

  Now that I saw what the furniture was doing in the space, I considered some rearranging, but I was pretty pleased in general. Just as two robots moved the last table into place, one of them stopped and announced, "This unit's replacement will arrive in twenty-two minutes. Sorry for any inconvenience. Please acknowledge. This unit's replacement will—"

  "I understand," I said, hoping that was the right way to acknowledge. It must have been because the robot then moved into a corner (thankfully one where I had not planned to put anything), locked its joints, and switched off.

  While I waited for whoever to arrive, I worked up a grocery list and had the robots test all the plumbing, electrical, and data connections. The printer in the library was merrily turning out posters and vus, including all ten of Bieris's auroc-de-mer pieces. She had emphatically pointed out to me that they were not at all typically Occitan, and I had counterargued to her that, first of all, they were brilliant and one could hardly get more Occitan than that, and in the second place, as the director and chief instructor of the Center, I was the planetary authority on what was Occitan and what wasn't.

  It was still a few minutes until the human worker was supposed to show up, so I put the robots to more cleaning (freshly grown buildings are always so dusty), took my vacuum bottle of hot coffee, and went up to the little solar on the third floor to watch the sun go down. I would skip my nap and work through First Dark, but I felt I had earned a bit of a break.

  The solar, with wide, comfortable benches and a lot of cushions, was intended as a place to talk or read, but the view through its tall arched windows was surprisingly fine. They'd located me near the University, down in the low, cold, nasty part of the city. Utilitopia, like Noupeitau, had been built on hills around a bay, but Noupeitau had been laid out by the great Arnaut de Riba Brava, with every major building placed to lead your eye up to the Great Hall of the Arts on Serra Sangi, flanked by the Palace and the Forum. Here, because the local sulfur-calcium cycle gave the sea a rotten-egg stench, and areas near the sea were cold and dank, a legal requirement, called the "balance of utilities," intended to make sure that no one became irrationally attached to any particular place, forced the more pleasant parts of the human environment to be located in the nastier parts of the physical environment, and vice versa. Thus, like the University, my Center was right on the waterfront, giving me a splendid view up the hillsides to Utilitopia's two dominating structures, which capped the Twin Hills like scarred nipples: the Municipal Sewage Processing Facility to the north, and the Central Stockyards and Abbatoir to the south.

  Yet west of the ugly boxed squalor of Utilitopia, the fierce amber eye of Mufrid, at last visible in the brief fogless period of last First Light, burned its way down between the high peaks of the Optimals. Light flashed from their icy upper reaches and deep shadows streaked down to the sea from them. As cooling water vapor from the glaciers drifted down into the dark sea-chilled chasms and fjords facing me, brief ferocious storms broke out, their lightning flaring in the rips and tears in the face of the range.

  As I watched, the moon broke from the western horizon and shot up the sky, toward the sun, darkening as it climbed. As owner of one of the few decent windows in town, it was all mine. But perhaps, with a little training, these people would be able to see what they had here.

  I realized why I was feeling better now than since I had come here. I had been doing real work all day—had in fact gotten up early to drive the cat in—and the work was toward something that really mattered, bringing a little of the light of culture to these cold, emotionless people. Sternly I reminded myself that I must not let them know that I was here to show
them a better way—missionaries, even those on behalf of simple human warmth and light, are never popular, after all!—but I knew what I was here to do.

  A trakcar slowed in the street in front of me, extended its wheels, and alighted, turning off the track to park next to my cat. I was most of the way to the door when the bell rang.

  The young man who stood shifting his weight from foot to foot in the Center's heatlock had Afro features and light blond hair. He didn't bother to look at me when he said, "Here for work duty."

  "Good," I said. "Come in, please. My name is Giraut Leones."

  I took his parka and hung it up, which seemed to startle him—I suppose he thought of that as work, and people don't work for robots. "This way. What's your name, by the way? I don't want to call you Unit Two."

  "Thorwald Spenders." For no reason I could see, he then recited his ident number.

  We spent an hour hanging posters in the hallways. Thorwald seemed a bit surprised that I cared which poster went where, and occasionally rearranged posters when I had a better idea or something didn't quite look right. I suppose he thought of them as wallpaper with inadequate coverage.

  The bar for the Lounge arrived. It took ten minutes of struggle for Thorwald and me to get it up the stairs, me wishing the whole time I had put in a real elevator instead of just installing a one-person springer.

  At last we had the bar in place. "You might as well stock it," I said. "The bottles are in those crates—just arrange them alphabetically."

  He nodded and started on the job; meanwhile I worked on getting a tapestry up. It was a machine dupe of a handmade, and usually those hang straighter, but they still take a lot of effort to get straight.